Mentors are senior employees who guide and support the new employees at work and we provided a training to enhance their staff development skills. Started the training in October 2019, we have had 108 participants in total. The survey results, which we conducted to new employees regarding the guidance provided by their mentors, were provided in a form of feedback during the training and this helped greatly to motivate the mentors.
We have been conducting inclusion training since fiscal 2020 with the purpose of developing employees who spur new value creation and learn mindsets and skills to fully draw out their individual latent talents.
In fiscal 2020, we offered training for managers, and 135 people participated. In fiscal 2021, we significantly expanded the scope of the training from upper-level managers to lower-level managers and conducted 10 training sessions (half day × 4 days ∕ time) over seven months.
In this training, we encourage self-awareness of unconscious bias and employees learn skills for communicating, listening, coaching, giving feedback, and facilitating interactions.
We aim to create a culture in which the seeds of transformation continually grow by enabling employees to utilize their skills at the workplace with awareness of their unconscious bias and the value of a diverse mix of opinions.
With the aim of training personnel capable of demonstrating leadership rooted in their own convictions, we have been holding cross-industry training since fiscal 2016.
In fiscal 2020, this training involved mid-level employees from various companies (around 30 people from a total of four companies) and was held in conjunction with other companies (in the daily necessities, insurance, and retail industries).
Over the course of about six months of training, participants develop their creativity and imagination as they look to the future and are exposed to diverse values and ideas through mutual study with employees from different industries. Participants acquire a sense of mission to realize the Idemitsu DNA through the exploration of their own leadership skills as potential leaders of future generations.
On June 10, 2021, Idemitsu Australia Resources (IAR) held the second session of its third round of leadership training (between May and September 2021) in which 22 people participated. Launched in 2018, this training program was developed by local managers with support from external consultants and targets management-level employees at the Brisbane Office and its three mines. Four to six sessions each year constitute one round of training with local managers serving as lecturers. The participants learn about Idemitsu’s history and philosophy as well as logic-based leadership skills through group debates. To date, 51 people have gone through this training. Through group debates of response methodologies that reference actual cases at IAR and issues that could arise in the workplace, the participants, who hail from various workplaces, debate the enhancement of management capabilities.
At Idemitsu Lubricants America (ILA), one of our challenges is to increase local staff’s satisfaction in training and career development, which will in turn lead to corporate growth. In the past, we were not able to provide sufficient education on our corporate philosophy, so local staff were unable to visualize their "ideal selves," causing low satisfaction levels.
To rectify this, each month from April through August 2020, we provided 30 minutes of remote training covering our corporate philosophy. We set five simplified themes to encourage wider understanding amongst local staff. A total of 132 local staff members participated in the training, and in the post-training survey, 74% of participants answered that their understanding of the corporate philosophy improved, and 90% answered that they were able to incorporate specific tenets into their work, a response that exceeded our expectations.
Going forward, we aim to further promote understanding through workshops that explore the relationship between our history and corporate philosophy as well as through the creation of plans that encourage the active exchange of opinions. In addition, we will discuss case studies with overseas branches that have self-analysis as part of their corporate philosophy education and link this to the development of local staff around the world.
Idemitsu offers support to enable each employee to autonomously build their career and work with a sense of satisfaction. For career building, we make departmental introduction materials available to all employees as a way of providing information to deepen understanding of the Company’s departments and operations. To revise career plans, we will hold a career plan seminar in fiscal 2020 that helps employees sort out not just what they want to do but also what they can and should do.
In FY2019, we held workshops throughout Japan, including at overseas bases. In the first workshop, 600 managers, who have subordinates from different backgrounds, participated in a skill and mindset training program aimed at understanding events that are likely to occur during the integration phase and facilitating the smooth integration. In the second workshop, we encouraged representatives of both managers and staff in charge to further promote understanding of the management vision and to set their own declaration of conduct to achieve it.
| First workshop | Second workshop | |
|---|---|---|
| Number of times | 20 times | 37 times |
| Number of participants | 600 people | 856 people |
On July 24, Idemitsu Kosan invited Dr. Iwao Nakatani from Fushiki-an (Japan’s elite educational institution for corporates), to give a lecture for some sixty executives and department/office managers. The objective was to encourage them to cultivate the ability to look at things from diverse perspectives by studying liberal arts and use this to examine and discuss various projects. As the lecture topic, Dr. Nakatani led the participants using “the present time” to reconnect with the history in the past and predict what future will be, and then re-evaluate their personal lives, the corporate business, and the development of the country.
